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David Abell

Personal blog · davidabell.substack.comhistoryculture

David Abell writes French Reflections, a personal blog at davidabell.substack.com about history and culture. Since 2023, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.

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6mentions?
6HN people?
2023–2025first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 3 in 2024

My writings, mostly but not entirely about French history. Click to read French Reflections, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

What Hacker News says?

  1. benbreen · 2023-10-03
    Well, that's just it - I use Google Translate all the time to translate historical texts, and for whatever reason, GPT-4 and Claude both work better. Since I deal with texts that feature archaic orthography like the long s (ſ) the main advantage over Google Translate is that LLMs can make educated guesses about what a word should be. But even in terms of pure translation ability — assuming all orthographic issues ha…

    Comment linking /p/playing-around-with-machine-translation

    on “Translating Latin demonology manuals with GPT-4 and Claude”
  2. Thevet · 2024-06-06

    Submitted Le vieux Paris n'est plus as a story · 61 points

    HN discussion
  3. diodorus · 2025-06-29

    Submitted On Academic Productivity as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  4. apollinaire · 2024-09-15

    Submitted The Enlightenment That Wasn't as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  5. pepys · 2023-11-29

    Submitted Historians and the Public as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  6. Hooke · 2024-03-14

    Submitted Dune, Eugenics, and the New Film as a story · 1 points

    HN discussion

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Linked by the same people?